The Dark Knights are on stage rocking the house and
front man
Travis Bellamy (Hal Ozson) is finishing up the last few
bars of their
big hit ‘Burn Down the House’… or it was ‘Set it on
Fire’… I can’t
remember but it had something to do with something
burning up. The
Coup de Grace of this little ditty is Travis setting his
arms on fire.
I know, like the dumbest band gag ever but who am I to
tell the Dark
Knights how to rock? To the surprise of no one,
something goes terribly
awry and Travis proceeds to set the entire building on
fire. The good
thing is that no one got hurt with the exception of one
teenage boy who
was trampled in the stampede to get the hell out of
there. The bad news
for the Dark Knights is that this boy has an older
sister who is
certifiably nuts and she will be joining the band in the
form of a
‘Groupie’.

A year after this tragedy the Dark Knights are on the
comeback
trail, going on tour and are in the process of recording
a live album
under the watchful sage eye of their manager Angus (Eric
Roberts). The
problem with the live album is the closing tune ‘Fire it
Up’ always
ends in a rousing chorus boos since Travis feels a
guilty and stuff
about the death of that boy a year ago and refuses to
light himself on
fire. What’s up with that, huh? What he needs is a muse
to set his
creative juices flowing and thus enters Riley (Taryn
Manning) who finds
a way to jump on the tour bus. First, however, she
murders the bands
publicist. I have no idea why she did this, the
publicist had nothing
to do with anything involving the death of her brother
and they also
shot this scene without showing us the killer, like they
were going
give us a ‘Murder She Wrote’ type mystery to figure out
who the killer
was. They chose not to pursue that angle. In fact they
probably
could’ve left the whole murderization of the publicist
out of this
picture since at no time after this woman’s murder was
she ever
mentioned again. You would think that somebody would’ve
sent a text
message to the band alerting them that their publicist
had just been
gutted in a public bathroom, but this did not happen.

So this band already has some groupies on the bus,
though I
thought each town had their own of groupie sect and
bringing your own
set of groupies with you kind of defeats the purpose of
having
groupies, doesn’t it? Anyway, Riley gets rid of those

groupies and now she has the band all to herself.
Nobody
trusts Riley, Angus doesn’t trust Riley, the Bassman
doesn’t trust
Riley and the fact that the death of pretty much
everybody coincides
with Riley’s arrival isn’t lost on the band, except for
Travis of
course who says ‘there’s something different about her’.
Uh, yeah…
she’s a psychopath Travis, that’s what’s different about
her. Can
Travis save his pregnant wife from the insanity of Riley
before it’s
too late? Oh… you might ask where did the pregnant wife
come from?
Completely out of the blue is where she came from. I
don’t want to
spoil it for you but if Travis survives this flick it’s
looking like
he’s going to be a solo artist from this point on.

Directed by long time movie veteran Mark L. Lester who
has
made some classics such as ‘The Class of 1984’,
‘Commando’ and
‘Showdown in Little Tokyo’… at least ‘Showdown in Little
Tokyo’ was a
classic to me… I don’t think that we will be able to
call ‘Groupie’ one
of those classics despite the best efforts of one Taryn
Manning. Note
that there is there’s nothing in this movie that is
glaringly
offensive. The story of a crazed fan stalking their prey
isn’t all that
original but it’s reasonably well presented here, the
performances are
solid enough if not spectacular and the movie looks
decent enough but I
guess that’s the problem with this production since it’s
all just so
‘ho-hum’.

The one thing that ‘Groupie’ does have working for it
that’s a
cut above is Taryn Manning who does a fine job of
selling us on the
fact the she is ninety pounds of trashy insanity. The
girl cries and
preens and cackles and slinks around while constantly
causing a ruckus
and killing stupid grown men. One might think that Ms.
Manning probably
couldn’t go toe to toe with a 6’ two hundred pound man,
taking round
house bolos to the jaw over and over again only to keep
coming,
considering she is a little light in the trunk, but just
a little
research reveals that Taryn Manning has black belt in
Karate so she can
legitimately kick somebody’s ass. Of course, if you
didn’t do your
research and create your own back story, you would be
stuck finding
this microscopic woman kicking much ass completely
unbelievable.

I’m a little surprised how lackluster ‘Groupie’ turned
out if
only because Mark L. Lester tends to make films with
just a little more
oomph than what we got with this one, and this one had
some oomph
potential. Now not all of Mr. Lester’s films are good,
but they tend to
stand out. If one was to excise the couple of titty
flash shots and
remove the few curse words we heard in this movie, we
would have a
completely acceptable Lifetime TV movie of the week. Not
that this is a
bad thing, but I tend not to watch those movies is all
I’m saying.